Saturday, May 26, 2012

Fish Memory…the T-Shirt (A funny filler post)

Trying to explain fish memory to a fellow co-worker and the next day he sends me a link to a shirt design that he found on sellout.woot.com about the subject. This is a great place to purchase those overstocked or reduced inventory items along with a few things that you might not see anywhere else. 

The conversation revolved around a theory why some lures work for a while at a particular spot and then fizzle out after prolonged use. It boils down to fish memory. The brain of a fish doesn’t have space to store and record daily events like that of a human. Their brain more or less records positive and negative responses throughout their life. Certain details may stick in their recall bank for long periods of time after some level of reinforcement. Not all fish are the same so memory will vary between species and even each individual fish.
It is difficult to say exactly what fish remember and most studies revolve around monitoring fish behavior. Instincts may play a large part as well but I think it is safe to say that most fish remember things well beyond three seconds as originally believed. Here are a few articles recently released that help support this.
It is my experience that fish will also remember lure types, colors, patterns and more making it increasingly difficult to catch over time. After so many years fishing of fishing a few small ponds, I swear that I have trained these fish to avoid senkos in 3 main colors. Each trip I am digging deeper and deeper into my tackle bag.
Here is a link to the shirt on sellout.woot.com. No affiliation with ColoradoCasters but the shirt graphic made me smile. Hence the funny filler post on the blogilicious.
Good luck and good fishing.

1 comment:

Mark Kautz said...

I completely agree with you about the memory. Sometimes I think it is we that are stuck using the same lures and don't think to change colors when they'd be glad to take something new.

Mark